Open to opportunities

bhargav Annavajhula

@bhargavannavajhula

Message

Principal engineer & architect delivering AI-first, secure cloud products.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a role where I can architect secure, AI-enabled cloud products—owning end-to-end delivery, automation, and production operations. I want teams that value safety (aligned LLM behavior), measurable reliability, and scalable multi-cloud delivery.

I’m a Principal Engineer / Architect who builds production-grade AI and cloud platforms end to end—architecture, implementation, deployment, and operations. At PracticeYourSpeech.com, I fine-tuned a base 7B LLM (Unsloth 4-bit QLoRA) with DPO safety alignment, deployed merged weights to Hugging Face Inference Endpoints with vLLM, and launched an AI speech-coaching SaaS with serverless evaluation and actionable feedback workflows.

At Verizon, I’ve led product development and cloud/security engineering across AI, multi-cloud delivery, and automation—delivering RAG-based gap analysis, accelerating AI onboarding with tenant management and RBAC, and translating security requirements into cloud components. I’ve also managed data engineering to reduce deployment friction, and I’ve driven cloud governance and DevSecOps remediation using automation (Ansible, Jenkins, Lambda, CloudFormation tooling like CFN-nag), improving operational visibility and security response workflows.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Principal Engineer/Architect

Current

Verizon Communications Inc.

Jan 2026 - Present (6 months)

Built a RAG-based gap analysis engine to validate customer inputs and generate proposal-ready findings. Architected AI Grid onboarding flows for tenant/user management, RBAC, Helm-based deployments, and GPUaaS/inferencing across OpenShift multi-tenant environments.

Manager, Data Engineering

Verizon Communications Inc.

Mar 2022 - Jul 2024 (2 years 4 months)

Reduced deployment friction for data science teams by standardizing Jenkins, Ansible, and container-based release automation, and accelerated ML delivery using SageMaker pipelines. Led work on ML/GenAI app capabilities and SSO/access control for web applications.

Principal Security Engineer

Verizon Communications Inc.

Jan 2016 - Jan 2019 (3 years)

Performed DevSecOps automation to deploy security remediation actions for violations detected in cloud infrastructure. Authored and advanced security automation around CFN-Nag scanning and infrastructure certification workflows across AWS accounts.

DevSecOps CFN Nag Security Protocols ICP AWS Config Rules Multi Profile Framework For CFN Nag AWS Lambda Security Response No Touch Deployments (Rehydration)Customer Email Notification Framework VzPolicy Plugin Automated Remediation Infrastructure Certification Platform (ICP)REST APIs Docker AWS Config AWS Lambda AWS Cloudwatch IAM No Touch Deployments

Earlier Verizon Experience

Verizon Communications Inc.

Jan 2000 - Jan 2016 (16 years)

Progressed through lead developer and architect roles spanning telecommunications preordering, local order management, and sales/marketing engineering systems. Owned analysis, design, coding, production support, and enterprise application delivery.

Telecom Ordering Order Management Sales Engineering Analysis System Design Coding Production Support enterprise applications Architecture

Cloud Architect & Lead Developer

PracticeYourSpeech.com

Architected and deployed a domain-specific AI speech-coaching product, including LLM fine-tuning and production deployment. Owned end-to-end implementation covering serverless evaluation workflows and self-service SaaS monetization.